Profile

Hello, I’m Alistair! I’m 23, originally from Guildford, but now live with my fiancé in Reading.

Gadgets are a big hobby of mine; I’ve built my own gaming PC, repair broken mobile phones just to see how they work, and would love to one day convert my own electric car.

Aside from this, I still make time to keep up-to-date with the latest Marvel films, as well as enjoy classics like Star Wars.

My most prized possession is probably my translucent-orange Nintendo 64, but I am also very proud of my Lego collection as well!

The experiment I work on reaches 150 MILLION degrees at the core, and this is ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun! In order to get to these incredible temperatures, we need several different ways of heating it, and I am in charge of making sure this equipment works the way it should!

Operations Days:
– 6:30am/2:30pm: Arrive at the control room (coffee recommended) and either turn on the machine if on early shift, or discuss how the morning went if on the late shift.
– Setting everything up takes about an hour in the morning, but we run two shifts per day, so coming in for the late shift means someone else has set everything up for you!
– Most of the day is spent delivering energy to the main machine; some days they want as much as we can provide, but sometimes they only want a little bit to see what the effect is. Whatever the other scientists ask for we have to programme in and send to them when they ask for it.
– Lunch/Dinner: Operations always stop for one meal per shift, which is lunch for the early shift and dinner for the late shift.
– Occasionally we need to pause operations to check something, and this means we need to stop the experiment and open up the building we keep it in.
– 2:30pm/10:30pm: End of the day! If on early shift, this means talking to the late shift and telling them how everything is running and what the experiment is today, and if on the late shift this means doing start-of-day procedures in reverse to shut everything down, and then it’s home time!

Office Days:
These are 8:15am to 4:30pm either in an office on site or at my desk at home, and are spent designing computer programs to calculate difficult problems, or using the computer to help sort through data from the experiments!